by Rock Lane CooperThis is a work of homoerotic fiction. If you are offended by such material or if you are not allowed access to it under the laws where you live, please exit now. This work is copyrighted by the author and may not be copied or distributed in any form without the written permission of the author, who may be contacted at: rocklanecooper@yahoo.com.

Note that these stories, including this one, are not an endorsement of unsafe sex. They take place many years before the appearance of AIDS and before it was standard practice to use condoms to reduce the risk of infection from sexually transmitted diseases. Remember always: that was then, this is now. Sex is precious, and so are life and health.

Chapter 8

At the first light of dawn, Craig
was up and dressed and standing on his front step with a cup of coffee, as
Wellington chased around the house sniffing out traces of animal intruders from
the night before. The morning newspaper lay in the driveway in a blue plastic
sleeve, and Brad walked out to retrieve it.

He unfolded the paper and looked at
the headlines. The bombing of North Vietnam was still going on, and there had
been a 7.5 earthquake in Nicaragua. His own problems shrank to nothing compared
to those of people elsewhere.

But during the night, wakeful on
the thin mattress of his son's bed, Brad had felt the full weight of his
dilemma. The prospect of recovering some semblance of a normal life, without
Craig, had been hard enough, but the effort required to patch up his marriage
seemed monumental. It was like trying to put a genie back into a bottle.

And what kind of life would he have
if he managed to achieve that? He could go through the motions of breadwinner,
marriage partner and father. But as much as he wanted to be that man, would his
heart ever be truly in it? He'd come to think of marriage as no more than a
shell game. You could believe you'd kept your eye on the one with the pea under
it, but it was never there. You couldn't win.

There's a price you pay for every
choice you make, he thought. He understood that much. And it was beginning to
feel like he would never pay off all the debts he'd accumulated. He also knew
that before he met Craig, he was slowly but surely dying inside. Where and when
did you decide that a sacrifice was no longer worth the price?

Something in him rebelled at the
thought of living year after year without the touch of another man. And for a
while last night, he'd simply yielded to the need to be free of what he owed to
everybody else. Staring at the ceiling just above him, he let himself imagine
for a while the comfortable intimacy of life with someone who filled his heart
with affection and happily surrendered to the same sexual desires.

But without Craig, imagination was
a cold comfort. Could he ever find someone else to take Craig's place, or was
he just someone you found once in a lifetime? Like first love, the sweetest,
the most memorable, but finally unattainable again after it was lost.

Wellington came bounding toward
him, then caught a fresh scent and was off and running again. Brad whistled for
him to come back. He was getting cold standing there in his sweatpants and
slippers.

A neighbor, out on his bicycle,
waved as he went by on the road. He was a young Indian man, who worked in the
pharmacy where Brad had picked up prescriptions for his kids' infections.
They'd met once at the grocery store, standing in line at the checkout. He
remembered his first name, Rahul, and his deep brown eyes behind tinted
glasses. Afterward, Brad realized he'd often seen him, pedaling his bike in all
weather.

The house slowly came to life as
one by one the kids appeared in the kitchen wanting breakfast. He'd let them pour
bowls of cereal, and he offered sugar and cinnamon toast, which only his
youngest daughter seemed to take an interest in. He looked at them sitting
around the table, still half-asleep and staring into space, except for his
ten-year-old Kathleen, who was reading a Nancy Drew novel while she ate.

Finally his wife came in, a
housecoat pulled on over her nightgown. She poured a cup of coffee and said
nothing to him except to ask if he'd turned up the heat. It felt cold in the
house. Then without waiting for him to answer, she left the room. After a
moment he could hear the furnace start up, and he guessed she had changed the
thermostat when she walked by it.

For a moment, it could have been an
ordinary Christmas vacation morning. The girls would drift back to their room.
Chris would turn on the TV and curl up on the couch with Wellington. If Travis
was here, he would be dressed and leaving the house to spend the day with his
friends. Coretta would be doing laundry and going out to the store for
something. And after another coffee, he would be reading a book until some job
around the house called him into actionthere was grout that needed to be
replaced in the bathroom.

He recalled Travis' remark that
they'd never been a family. He wondered if this predictable routine of theirs
was what he meant.

After the first two pages of a book
on European history, he put it down, realizing that he couldn't remember a word
of what he'd just read. He went to the bathroom, stared at the grout job and
felt only a growing impatience. It was a familiar feeling that came over him
often in this house, a feeling of being trapped like an animal in a cage.

He decided to take Wellington for a
run in the park and ask Chris if he wanted to come along. Then he remembered
Clayton in Buffalo and wondered if the postcard had arrived for his friend, the
ranch foreman. How long would it wait there to be picked up, and how long would
it take for him to read Brad's phone number and call it?

He realized that until Clayton's
friend knew how to find him, he was obliged to stay at home and wait near the
phone. He reconsidered the book on European history and the grout job and tried
to think of something else to occupy his time. He found Chris in his room and
asked if he'd like to play chess.

When he heard the phone ring two
hours later, he couldn't recall how many matches he'd lost to his son.

"You're not even trying, Dad,"
Chris had complained more than once.

It was true that Brad had found it
hard to keep his mind on the board, and when he won once to prove he was making
an effort, he wondered if Chris had let him win.

"How did you get so good anyway?"
he said when he got up to go to the phone.

"Travis," the boy said simply. "I
learned all his moves, and then a few more."

When he got to the phone, it was
Clayton again. He said he was hanging out at the post office, waiting for his
friend Len to show up and get his mail.

"Don't get picked up for
loitering," Brad said.

"It's not that kind of post
office," Clayton said, laughing, and explained that he'd got a room at the Y
where he had enough money to stay for two more nights.

"I can wire you more," Brad
reminded him.

"I got ways of making a few bucks
when I need it."

Brad didn't like the way this
sounded. "I don't want you doing anybody any favors for money, OK?"

Clayton laughed again. "You worry
too much about me."

Brad rang off when his daughter
Lisa came into the room, wanting to show him her new Malibu Barbie. He sat with
her on the floor as she described the doll's clothes and asked him to make up a
story about her.

She loved his stories, even more
than the rest of his children, who when they were young all readily believed in
the far-fetched adventures he made up for them about their dolls, the Barbies
and Raggedy Anns, the GI Joes, the toy dinosaurs, and teddy bears. He'd always
been in demand at bedtime for this, and in earlier times, Coretta had even
asked him once for a story of her own as they got into bed.

It had been a teasing joke, but
he'd told her one anyway, about a handsome, horny prince who dreamed each night
of a roll in the hay with a milk maid of certain proportionswho resembled
Coretta herself in many ways, which he went on to enumerate, kissing each part
of her body as he described it, from her nose, to her knees, to her breasts.

"And then he touched her right
here," he said, his fingers slipping between her legs, "with a special part of
his own body, which was all warm and hard." She'd laughed then, unable to
contain her delight at his wonderful foolishness. And the story had ended there
as they began what was always referred to later as their night of fairytale
lovemaking.

But it had never happened again.
Once was enough, she would say, whenever he brought up the memory of it. There
was something a little too silly about it and maybe a little too strange for
two grownups. And silliness or strangeness had a way of making her
uncomfortable. That was a difference between them.

"Anyway, the walls in this house
are thin," she would say. A raunchy bedtime story wasn't something she wanted
any of the kids to overhear.

Today Coretta had stayed late
behind the closed door of theirnow herbedroom. Maybe lying in bed and going
over the story of her own life, far from any fairytale.

As he sat with Lisa, following
Barbie from her trendy apartment in Hollywood to the beach, to swim and play
with her friends, he thought of how life had disappointed his wife, burdened as
she was with the responsibilities of motherhood and finding herself married to
someone who was not the man she thought he was.

It got to be noon, and one after
the other his children arrived in the kitchen again, hungry and puzzled by
their mother's absence. Kathleen came first, still carrying her Nancy Drew
book. He stood and asked her to help him make peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches.

"We can pretend we're at school
having lunch," he said, trying to get a smile out of her.

"Very funny, Dad," she said.

She already had something of
Travis' temperament, and he wondered how each of them took after their
motherintelligent, questioning, always wanting more than life seemed willing
to grant them.

He wished he'd had what it took to
be more of a breadwinner and less intent on pursuing this poorly paid desire to
be a college teacher. Money couldn't buy everything, but that's what you told
yourself when there wasn't enough of it.

"Put them in a bowl," he told
Kathleen when she set the bag of potato chips in the middle of the table. She
rolled her eyes but did what he said.

"I want fried chicken," Chris said,
coming into the room.

"We'll get a bucket from Colonel
Sanders tonight if nobody feels like cooking," he said.

He heard the front door open and
close, and Travis joined them.

"Look what the dog didn't eat,"
Kathleen said. It was a snappy phrase she'd picked up at school and started
using to express disdain for her siblings.

"How would you like a knuckle
sandwich?" Travis retorted.

"No threats of violence before we
eat," Brad said, always the referee.

Lisa, trying to help, was asking
Brad to hand her glasses from the cupboard to set around the table. Chris was
putting a paper napkin at each place.

"I don't eat peanut butter and
jelly," Travis announced.

"We've got bologna," Brad said,
refusing to be intimidated by this boy who was already almost as tall as he
was.

"Yuck. You know what they make that
stuff out of?" Travis said.

"Chicken lips, chicken lips," Chris
was chanting.

"It's no better than cat food,"
Travis said.

"And you know because you've
actually eaten cat food," Kathleen said. She lifted a jug of milk from the
refrigerator and gave it to him. "Here, do something useful," she told him.

Brad fully expected the boy to
refuse and tell her to do it herself, but Travis took the milk and began
pouring it into the glasses. Despite their usual exchange of insults, he knew
that Travis and Kathleen were each other's strongest allies in the family.
Neither was about to spoil that by letting their differences go too far.

Brad marveled at the complexities
of the alliances and political maneuvers among his children and wondered how
much of that they'd learned from watching Coretta and himself. He wished he'd
been more aware of that as the two of them had unthinkingly brought children
into the world. But it was too late now to reconsider or start over.

Travis had grabbed a sandwich
before Kathleen had put them on the table, and Brad had to say, "Nobody eats
until we're all sitting down." Travis scowled at him, but put it back. He was
less difficult, Brad thought, when there weren't his buddies watching from the
sidelines.

They sat down around the table, and
when Chris, who was the religious one, said grace, they realized that Coretta
had appeared in the doorway and was watching them. She was dressed in the same
housecoat she'd been wearing in the morning.

"Look at you all," she said. "You
can do fine without me." It wasn't a complaint, just a statement of fact.

This was not a statement of fact or
meant to be one. True, she had said it before, but this time it carried an
uncertain weight he wasn't sure how to take. It was a reminder that they were
not what they had beenfor better or for worse. They were something elseto
be determined.

The children fell silent, almost as
if they wished they could disappear. It troubled Brad how much the last weeks,
maybe months, had surely affected them. They knew something was going on between
Brad and their mother, but it was like they'd all agreed not to bring it up.

Coretta poured herself more coffee,
and left again. The silence continued for a long minute, and then Travis said,
"Is Mom OK?"

This was not the same Travis who
had challenged Brad in the car the day before. The look on his face was hard to
read. It was a grown-up question, expecting an honest answer, but spoken with
the trusting innocence of the boy he once was.

"I think she needs some time for
herself," Brad said.

"Is she sick?" Lisa wanted to know.
"She takes pills."

"She's not sick," Chris insisted.
"Just a little tired. That's what she said."

He waited for them to ask him why
he hadn't been at home and why he had not been with them for Christmas. But if
those questions had been in their thoughts, they said nothing. Even Travis, who
seemed to understand more than the others, said not a word.

The afternoon darkened as the sky
filled with wintry clouds, and eventually there were snow flurries swirling by
the windows. Someone switched on the Christmas tree lights, and Brad wished
there was a fireplace so they could have a fire, with the sweet smell and
crackling of burning wood.

By four o'clock it was growing
dark, and Brad did something he had not done in a long time. He made a pot of
tea, warmed a pitcher of milk and put it all on a tray with teacups and a plate
of Christmas cookies. He went to the bedroom where Coretta had been all day and
tapped on the door.

"Room service," he said and waited
for her reply.

In better times, she would have
replied with a cheerful "Yes, come in." But her response was more of a grumble,
and he carefully balanced the tray on one arm as he opened the door to go in.
He found her in bed lifting a sleep mask from her face.

"Got some tea," he said and set
down the tray on an upholstered seat they'd found once at a garage sale. She
sat up and smiled at him faintly, then took the cup of tea he'd poured.

He raised the window blind to show
her the snow falling. She'd always been happy to see snow. There was too little
of it for her in Santa Fe, coming from Colorado and growing up on skis. He sat
on the opposite side of the bed with his cup of tea and waited for her to say
something.

"The kids love you," she finally
said. "You go away for days at a time and they don't complain. You leave
presents for them, and those are the ones that count. Not the ones from me."

He was sure it wasn't this way, but
he didn't want to contradict her.

"In their eyes, you can do no
wrong," she said. "It's so unfair."

And it went on like this. He
finally set the teacup down because he felt stupid drinking from it. He didn't
want it anyway and had only made the tea for her. The cookies lay untouched on
the plate.

"This may not be what you want to
hear," she said, "but I'm going to say it anyway. I can forgive you for what
happened. Not today, but give me some time."

He hated that this was what had to
be resolved between them, this infidelity. It reduced everything else to
nothing, because nothing else mattered as long as this single ugly fact stood
between them.

"Forgiveness I know how to do," she
said. "But I can't imagine how I can ever forget."

She had to be honest with him, she
said. She knew herself well enough that once someone had betrayed her trust,
there was no going back. It was a wound that might heal, but there would always
be a scar.

"I'm not saying I can't live with
that," she said. "But I don't know if you can."

She reached for a cigarette and
discovered the pack was empty.

It offered a brief distraction from
the panic that suddenly filled him. "I can go to the store and buy you some
more," he said.

"You want to give me cancer, too?"

The cold humor in her voice was a
jolt that pushed him closer to the edge of the free-fall he was beginning to feel
in his gut.

"No, I don't." He said the words as
calmly as he was able.

She put down her teacup and looked
at him across this bed where they had been married partners for so many years.
"I don't want you to stay here tonight," she said. "I think you should move out
until you've decided what you really want to do."

She lay back on the pillow and
turned away from him. She had no more to say.

Neither did he. She knew him well
enough to speak the truth. He did not know what he wantedor whether he would
ever know.

He got a gym bag out of his closet
and filled it with socks and underwear, clean shirts, a sweater, his running
shoes, a pair of jeans. In the bathroom, he emptied his shelf of the medicine
cabinet.

He'd promised fried chicken for
dinner, and when he went to the car to drive to the Colonel Sanders, he tossed
the bag into the trunk. Chris and Wellington came along for the ride, and the
boy helped him brush the afternoon's snowfall from the front and back windows
before they left.

Chris was absorbed in describing to
his father a chess maneuver he had learned, and all the way there and back, the
car filling with the smell of the fried chicken as they returned, it could have
been any night for Brad as a father and husband. But he had to keep reminding
himself that it wasn't just any night. He was leaving the comfort of who and
what he'd been, and from here he had no idea what was coming next.

Arriving back at the house, he
found Kathleen by the phone, holding the receiver out to him as he and Chris
came through the door. "Call for you, Daddy," she said and took the bucket of
chicken from him.

"Would this be Brad?" a deep,
unfamiliar voice came from the other end of the line. "I want you to know
there's a young man here claims you know him." It was Clayton's friend Len,
calling from Wyoming.

Then he heard Clayton's voice, too.
"I found him, I found him," he kept saying, more than a little excited. They'd
had a couple beers and apparently squeezed together into a phone booth to make
the call.

Len seemed fairly happy himself. He
thanked Brad for his help and told him he'd always be welcome if he ever came
anywhere near Buffalo. "Clayton here says you're as good a man as they come,
and he wants us to meet some day."

For a moment, Brad let himself share
their noisy delight in being reunited. Fortune had smiled and let them have
what they wanted. Then he hung up and wondered if there was any way he'd ever
find something like that for himself.

The minutes ticked away as he spent
the rest of the evening with his children, maybe for the last time in a long
time, and he broke it to them that he'd be leaving shortly, and they'd have to
put themselves to bed, remembering to look after their mother and do anything
for her she needed. Chris would have his usual job of taking care of
Wellington.

Then he hugged each of them,
promised to see them again soon, put on his coat, and left.

He'd decided to drive out to the
highway and see if there was a room at the Motel 6. But somewhere on the way
there, he took a turn toward the college, and drove one more time past the
house where Del lived. This time there were lights on inside, and he stopped.

An impulse had come over him that
had lingered at the edge of awareness all day. He had felt it again as he'd
reached the end of the talk he'd had with Coretta. While everything around him
seemed to be coming undone, there was one person he knew he wanted to be with.

Entering the house, he found a
couple of students, a boy and a girl, sitting close together on a couch in front
of a fire, their backs to him.

"Excuse me," Brad said,
apologizing. "Is Del here?"

The boy turned to look at him.
"Yeah, he's in his room," he said, and Brad could see that his shirt was
unbuttoned. The girl only lifted her head from where it had been on his
shoulder.

Brad went down the hall and knocked
on Del's door. He could hear loud music coming from inside and recognized what
sounded like a Rolling Stones song.